The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

For over three decades, the great inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil has been one of the most respected and provocative advocates of the role of technology in our future. In his classic The Age of Spiritual Machines, he argued that computers would soon rival the full range of human intelligence at its best. Now he examines the next step in this inexorable evolutionary process: the union of human and machine.

The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World

Under the aegis of machine learning in our data-driven machine age, computers are programming themselves and learning about - and solving - an extraordinary range of problems, from the mundane to the most daunting. Today it is machine learning programs that enable Amazon and Netflix to predict what users will like, Apple to power Siri's ability to understand voices, and Google to pilot cars.

On Intelligence

Jeff Hawkins, the man who created the PalmPilot, Treo smart phone, and other handheld devices, has reshaped our relationship to computers. Now he stands ready to revolutionize both neuroscience and computing in one stroke, with a new understanding of intelligence itself.

Machine Learning: The New AI: The MIT Press Essential Knowledge Series

In this audiobook, machine learning expert Ethem Alpaydin offers a concise overview of the subject for the general listener, describing its evolution, explaining important learning algorithms, and presenting example applications. Alpaydin offers an account of how digital technology advanced from number-crunching mainframes to mobile devices, putting today's machine learning boom in context.

Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies

Superintelligence asks the questions: What happens when machines surpass humans in general intelligence? Will artificial agents save or destroy us? Nick Bostrom lays the foundation for understanding the future of humanity and intelligent life. The human brain has some capabilities that the brains of other animals lack. It is to these distinctive capabilities that our species owes its dominant position. If machine brains surpassed human brains in general intelligence, then this new superintelligence could become extremely powerful - possibly beyond our control.

Surviving AI: The Promise and Peril of Artificial Intelligence

Surviving AI is a concise, easy guide to what's coming, taking you through technological unemployment (the economic singularity) and the possible creation of a superintelligence (the technological singularity).

Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era

Artificial Intelligence helps choose what books you buy, what movies you see, and even who you date. It puts the "smart" in your smartphone and soon it will drive your car. It makes most of the trades on Wall Street, and controls vital energy, water, and transportation infrastructure. But Artificial Intelligence can also threaten our existence. In as little as a decade, AI could match and then surpass human intelligence. Corporations and government agencies are pouring billions into achieving AI’s Holy Grail - human-level intelligence.

Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions

All our lives are constrained by limited space and time, limits that give rise to a particular set of problems. What should we do, or leave undone, in a day or a lifetime? How much messiness should we accept? What balance of new activities and familiar favorites is the most fulfilling? These may seem like uniquely human quandaries, but they are not: computers, too, face the same constraints, so computer scientists have been grappling with their version of such problems for decades.

Sapiens

Earth is 4.5 billion years old. In just a fraction of that time, one species among countless others has conquered it. Us. We are the most advanced and most destructive animals ever to have lived. What makes us brilliant? What makes us deadly? What makes us sapiens? In this bold and provocative audiobook, Yuval Noah Harari explores who we are, how we got here, and where we're going.

Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work

The authors of the best-selling Bold and The Rise of Superman explore altered states of consciousness and how they can ignite passion, fuel creativity, and accelerate problem solving, in this groundbreaking book in the vein of Daniel Pink's Drive and Charles Duhigg's Smarter Faster Better.

A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age

Claude Shannon was a tinkerer, a playful wunderkind, a groundbreaking polymath, and a digital pioneer whose insights made the Information Age possible. He constructed fire-breathing trumpets and customized unicycles, outfoxed Vegas casinos, and built juggling robots, but he also wrote the seminal text of the Digital Revolution. That work allowed scientists to measure and manipulate information as objectively as any physical object. His work gave mathematicians and engineers the tools to bring that world to pass.

The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

Much of what will happen in the next 30 years is inevitable, driven by technological trends that are already in motion. In this fascinating, provocative new book, Kevin Kelly provides an optimistic road map for the future, showing how the coming changes in our lives - from virtual reality in the home to an on-demand economy to artificial intelligence embedded in everything we manufacture - can be understood as the result of a few long-term accelerating forces.

Artificial Intelligence: What Everyone Needs to Know

Artificial Intelligence is likely to greatly increase our aggregate wealth, but it will also upend our labor markets, reshuffle our social order, and strain our private and public institutions. Eventually it may alter how we see our place in the universe, as machines pursue goals independent of their creators and outperform us in domains previously believed to be the sole dominion of humans.

Ten years from today, the center of our digital lives will no longer be the smart phone, but device that looks like ordinary eyeglasses: except those glasses will have settings for virtual and augmented reality. What you really see and what is computer generated will be mixed so tightly together, that we won't really be able to tell what is real and what is illusion.

The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

In recent years, Google’s autonomous cars have logged thousands of miles on American highways and IBM’s Watson trounced the best human Jeopardy! players. Digital technologies — with hardware, software, and networks at their core — will in the near future diagnose diseases more accurately than doctors can, apply enormous data sets to transform retailing, and accomplish many tasks once considered uniquely human.

Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future

We live in strange times. A machine plays the strategy game Go better than any human; upstarts like Apple and Google destroy industry stalwarts such as Nokia; ideas from the crowd are repeatedly more innovative than corporate research labs. MIT's Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson know what it takes to master this digital-powered shift: we must rethink the integration of minds and machines, of products and platforms, and of the core and the crowd.

The Industries of the Future

Leading innovation expert Alec Ross explains what's next for the world, mapping out the advances and stumbling blocks that will emerge in the next 10 years - for businesses, governments, and the global community - and how we can navigate them.

Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future

In a world of self-driving cars and big data, smart algorithms and Siri, we know that artificial intelligence is getting smarter every day. Though all these nifty devices and programs might make our lives easier, they're also well on their way to making "good" jobs obsolete. A computer winning Jeopardy might seem like a trivial, if impressive, feat, but the same technology is making paralegals redundant as it undertakes electronic discovery, and is soon to do the same for radiologists.

Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life, in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies

Visionary physicist Geoffrey West is a pioneer in the field of complexity science, the science of emergent systems and networks. The term complexity can be misleading, however, because what makes West's discoveries so beautiful is that he has found an underlying simplicity that unites the seemingly complex and diverse phenomena of living systems, including our bodies, our cities, and our businesses.

Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future

In the spirit of Steve Jobs and Moneyball, Elon Musk is both an illuminating and authorized look at the extraordinary life of one of Silicon Valley's most exciting, unpredictable, and ambitious entrepreneurs - a real-life Tony Stark - and a fascinating exploration of the renewal of American invention and its new makers.

Neuroplasticity: The MIT Press Essential Knowledge Series

Fifty years ago, neuroscientists thought that a mature brain was fixed like a fly in amber, unable to change. Today, we know that our brains and nervous systems change throughout our lifetimes. This concept of neuroplasticity has captured the imagination of a public eager for self-improvement - and has inspired countless Internet entrepreneurs who peddle dubious "brain training" games and apps. In this book, Moheb Costandi offers a concise and engaging overview of neuroplasticity for the general listener.

Redesigning Life: How Genome Editing Will Transform the World

Since the birth of civilization, human beings have manipulated other life-forms. We have selectively bred plants and animals for thousands of years to maximize agricultural production and cater to our tastes in pets. The observation of the creation of artificial animal and plant variants was a key stimulant for Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. The ability to directly engineer the genomes of organisms first became possible in the 1970s, when the gene for human insulin was introduced into bacteria.

Thinking Statistically

Thinking Statistically is the book that shows you how to think like a statistician, without worrying about formal statistical techniques. Along the way we learn how selection bias can explain why your boss doesn't know he sucks (even when everyone else does); how to use Bayes' theorem to decide if your partner is cheating on you; and why Mark Zuckerberg should never be used as an example for anything.

Humans Need Not Apply: A Guide to Wealth and Work in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

After billions of dollars and 50 years of effort, researchers are finally cracking the code on artificial intelligence. As society stands on the cusp of unprecedented change, Jerry Kaplan unpacks the latest advances in robotics, machine learning, and perception powering systems that rival or exceed human capabilities. Driverless cars, robotic helpers, and intelligent agents that promote our interests have the potential to usher in a new age of affluence and leisure.

Publisher's Summary

Ray Kurzweil, the bold futurist and author of the New York Times best seller The Singularity Is Near, is arguably today’s most influential technological visionary. A pioneering inventor and theorist, he has explored for decades how artificial intelligence can enrich and expand human capabilities. Now, in his much-anticipated How to Create a Mind, he takes this exploration to the next step: reverse-engineering the brain to understand precisely how it works, then applying that knowledge to create vastly intelligent machines.

Drawing on the most recent neuroscience research, his own research and inventions in artificial intelligence, and compelling thought experiments, he describes his new theory of how the neocortex (the thinking part of the brain) works: as a self-organizing hierarchical system of pattern recognizers. Kurzweil shows how these insights will enable us to greatly extend the powers of our own mind and provides a road map for the creation of super-intelligence - humankind’s most exciting next venture. We are now at the dawn of an era of radical possibilities in which merging with our technology will enable us to effectively address the world’s grand challenges.

How to Create a Mind is certain to be one of the most widely discussed and debated science books in many years - a touchstone for any consideration of the path of human progress.

Kurzweil spends more time comparing himself to the great minds of humanity than he does actually discussing his theories. The content is laced mostly with anecdotal fluff, and quotes by other people to make his writing sound more impressive. I'm really happy Audible allows returns because this book is a waste of money. You'd save yourself a lot of time and frustration by just reading a synopsis of the book.

If you don’t know much about the current state of artificial intelligence, brain science, or the philosophy of consciousness, and don’t mind a little bit of technical discussion, Kurzweil does a fine job of articulating the current rapid converge between these areas of understanding. However, if you already do know the basics, this book probably isn’t going to do much to expand your own consciousness.

Speaking as a software engineer who has a fascination with AI, I largely agree with Kurzweil's glowing assessments about the future of machine intelligence, though I'd probably push his timeframe back a few decades and could do with a bit less of his self-promotion. Though there's a lot we still don't understand about how the human brain operates, neuroscience and computer science are starting to form the same fundamental insights about how intelligence "works", whether it's represented as neurons or a mathematical process. In a truly intelligent machine, data from the outside world is taken in by a large, hierarchical array of pattern-recognizers, which gradually rewire themselves to better anticipate the messy-but-hierarchical patterns of the real world (visual squiggles to letters, letters to words, words to syntax, syntax to meanings, meanings to relationships, relationships to concepts, concepts to insights -- and back down again). To some extent, the software world has already made useful progress in this direction.

However, most of the insights Kurzweil offers aren’t anything new. Indeed, most of what he says was explored in Jeff Hawkin’s 2004 book, On Intelligence, and in academia before that. Briefly stated, the hierarchical architecture of the human brain’s neocortex is the major engine of human intelligence, and it seems to start out mostly as a blank slate, a generalized learning machine that builds neural connections through experience, eventually forming a complex inductive model of reality, which constantly makes predictions about what comes next. Kurzweil shares some of his own successes solving certain kinds of problems decades ago, but the new ideas he advances seem somewhat vague and underdeveloped (maybe he’s saving the nuts and bolts for his new job at Google).

Still, there's plenty here for a general audience, when he gets away from the geekery. Kurzweil is passionate and pretty convincing about his belief that even limited gains in awareness of how the human brain works still provide AI researchers with some powerful springboards, and that, conversely, advances (or missteps) in AI teach us more about the brain. As he points out in discussing Watson, the IBM computer system that famously won on Jeopardy after acquiring most of its knowledge from scanning natural-language documents (the sampling of questions it got right is impressive), things have already come a long way. And there's no reason to believe that the rapid convergence won't continue, especially in the post-cloud computing world. After all, the specific, idiosyncratic way our monkey-rat-lizard brains were shaped to think as our ancestors crawled/darted/clambered around undoubtedly isn't the only way an evolutionary process can discover thought.

There’s also a succinct but informative history of the field of AI, with brief overviews of significant thinkers and developments. And Kurzweil wades a little bit into the philosophy of consciousness, exploring some its more paradoxical aspects in light of what science knows about the human brain. For example, it's been shown that the two cerebral hemispheres, in patients with a severed connection, operate almost as two separate brains. Yet, each one still seems to think it has a conscious link to the other. Maybe such individuals are more like two people in one body, but don't realize it? Eerie, huh? His other thought experiments are nothing new, but still fun. Everyone should know what the Chinese Room is.

Finally, there’s a section in which Kurzweil responds to critics, and calls out a few flagrant misunderstandings of his ideas. While it’s debatable how on-target his past predictions about technology have been, as far as I’m concerned, if he was even halfway right, then he’ll be fully right soon enough.

Overall, I think I would recommend this book most to AI neophytes who haven’t read anything by Kurzweil before. His enthusiasm for the topic can be quite inspiring. For other readers, especially those who have read On Intelligence, I don’t think you’re missing anything essential. I’d probably give this one 4 stars for the former audience, 2.5 for the latter, 3.5 overall.

I’m a fan of Kurtzweil. I find his book The Singularity is Near to be an essential part of any modern education. He is also the most financially successful Artificial Inelegance (AI) researcher to date. So he’s a great philosopher, a great researcher, and a great businessmen, but apparently he’s not infallible, because this book missed the mark.

In a nutshell his answer to the question, “How do you/we make a mind” is “The same way we’ve been trying for the last 30 years”. This answer is so close to brilliant it’s spooky. I think there have been profound changes in AI over the last 5 or 6 years. Big data is suddenly revealing (or at least strongly suggesting) that we in fact may have been making pretty good synthetic minds for decades and just didn’t know it. The problem has been that having made a good synthetic mind we don’t know how to educate it. At the same time (because of advances in AI) we may be on the cusp of discovering that we don’t know how to educate biological minds either (and have been making nearly the same mistakes as the AI community has been making). In this book Kurzweil presents much of the data in support of this argument, and then walks away from what to me seemed the logical conclusion.

To make matters worse his overview of 30 years of AI is quite narrow. One might get the impression that he believes that Multi-Layer Hidden Markov Models are all that is needed. Perhaps in some since any of a dozen AI methods are sufficient, in the same since that Truing Machines are sufficient, but the field of synthetic mind creation is much richness than presented here, as the author must have known.

I am currently 2 hours into the book and it is everything I hoped for - possibly the best audiobook I've listened to so far. I am a Ray Kurzweil fan. I've already listened to "The Singularity is Near", a book which contains a lot of data tables, that, in my opinion, kind of hampered the listening experience. This book on the other hand, has a straightforward narrative style that translates very well into the audio format. The reader speaks a bit slow for my taste, but that is a very minor complaint. The information in this book is fascinating. If you're a fan of science, technology and futurism, or if you are interested in the human mind and how it works, you will love this book.

I am offering this mainly as a quick, dissenting opinion. Having finished the book a week ago, I find that surprisingly little lingers in my mind. Undoubtedly Kurzweil (such an ironic name, given his passion for immortality) has an explanation for this in units of Shannon entropy. I am actually sympathetic to Kurzweil's post-humanist ambitions and mechanical modeling. It's nice to have a stream of books by such an ambitious techno-provocateur. But unless you are planning to tinker together a mind in your garage workshop, the book can be a little tedious. There is a lot about "pattern recognition" in the neocortex, which is not exactly news. We hear about "neuron firing" speeds and networks, about exponential rates of change and phase shifts, which again did not generate any "Aha" moments in this listener's mind. While Kurzweil trots out a few philosophers for refutation, the many philosophical and common-sensical objections against a physical analysis of consciousness are largely swept under the rug. As a visionary technologist with many knowledgeable admirers, Kurzweil has perhaps earned the right to tout (once again) his many correct predictions, though I don't know if anyone is keeping track of the hindsight factor. Still, his confidence reminds me of those brief, brilliant historical moments (the Vienna logical positivists; particle physics just prior to quantum theory) when thinkers felt certain they had finally drained the bogs of metaphysics, only to find paradoxes bubbling back up and themselves sucked back down. If you are a Kurzweil fan, by all means, enjoy. If you are building a brain in the basement, you may prefer the printed text. If you want an audiobook with fresh insights into the philosophy of mind or an ingenious new model of consciousness, you may find this disappointingly dry, bogless, and shallow. But easy on the ears: the reading is very good.

Kurzweil is not for everyone, but he is for me. He covers a wide range of topics from how the brain works, quantum physics, logical positivism and Ludwig Wittgenstein up to what does it really mean to be human.

I get a little glossy eyed during the description of the brain and its interactions, but he explains them as good as anyone and I could follow them but not well enough to repeat it to others, but when he's talking about what constitutes a thinking human is where he really excels and excites and I can and will repeat to others his thoughts on that stuff.

The narrator really added to the books enjoyment. I thought he was narrating the book exactly the way the author would have been while he was writing the book.

I would give a repeat listen again in one years time to compare the rate of technology to his predictions. Especially now that he is working at Google. I have read or listened to all of Ray's books, and while I think some of his predictions are a little grandiose, many are spot on. <br/><br/>Technology has always fascinated me. The whole idea of a set of machine software to bring about innovation, products, revelations and revolutions to many areas of our world is both exciting and intriguing.<br/><br/>The explanation of how the mind is layered with pattern recognizer's over and over not only has this been proven, but replicated on some small proof of concepts already. It is an exciting time.

What other book might you compare How to Create a Mind to and why?

None come to mind.

What about Christopher Lane’s performance did you like?

He brought an energy and excitement to the book. Sometimes the material get a little dry, he kept you interested.

If you were to make a film of this book, what would be the tag line be?

Welcome to the world of tomorrow.

Any additional comments?

Having the kindle version of this helped out a lot. There isn't too many charts or pictures, but I found that following along during a section/chapter that I found really interesting helped me understand it a little easier.